Will Amazon.com Destroy Bookstores, Publishers and Writers?

There's a lively little comment thread going over at Ed Gorman's blog reacting to his post about how many of the best selling books for the Kindle are free. Crime fiction writer Dave Zeltserman commented, “Didn't mean to delete my comment, which was about Matt's reasonable anger towards where the kindle will be taking us--death of bookstores, death of publishers, and eventually the death books, at least those written by professional authors (since there will be no way to make money with novels).”

I'm amazed at the apocalyptic alarmism about the imminent death of bookstores, publishing and professional writers caused by the introduction of the Kindle and other reading gadgets.

If the Kindle et al are selling as well as their proponents are claiming, it means that there are a surprisingly large number of people so enthusiastic about reading that they are willing to invest $200+ just to read books.

Where there are enthusiastic readers there is a robust market for books. Where there is a market for books, in any format, there are commercial opportunities to exploit textual content.

If walk-in bookstores are slowly supplanted by electronic only books, so what? Books will still be read, only in different ways.

Although Kindle owners might like all books to be free, it won't happen. Writing is a time intensive occupation that most people can't pursue if they aren't able to generate at least a subsistence income. There will always be a lot of cheap or even free ebooks from frustrated writers unable to interest reputable publishers in their books who utilized vanity presses and POD in the past. Most readers will ignore those books, as they do now.

With the flood of available content, there will remain a need for some system readers can rely upon to sift the dross from the gold. Right now, agents, publishers and the admittedly declining venues for reviews serve that function. The need for qualitative ratings will remain. Some system will arise to satisfy it.

I'm not scared about Amazon's prospects for world domination. It remains to be seen whether the Kindle, with its proprietary software, will conquer the ereader category. There are already alternatives to Amazon, like Sribd.com, where writers can make texts available in a variety of formats and set their own price. More such sites are likely to spring up. But, assuming that Amazon eventually becomes the sole publisher of books, they can only make a profit charging for them, and the talented writer will still have a publisher seeking to purchase their writing.

Celebrity Books

How many times do we have to read the same hand-wringing screed about how celebrity books are destroying good literature and perverting the nobler instincts of publishers?

I must confess that when I heard, in 2007, that Katie Price’s debut novel had sold more copies that the entire Booker shortlist that year, I did smile. Publishers have to make a profit, and novels by celebrities sell. Indeed, they might shift around 100,000 in hardback, compared with less than 1,000 for the average hardback literary novel. And, in theory, for every celebrity book that makes money, the publisher is given the chance to take a risk on a dozen literary novels which deserve publication, but which may well make a loss.

In some ways, I felt sorry for the assembled publishers having to sit through Lynda La Plante’s tirade. Most of them are highly educated with a passion for literature, and they became publishers in the hope of finding the next Vladimir Nabokov, not the next Martine McCutcheon. They must find this trend pretty dispiriting, too. Last Christmas, the entire top 10 for non-fiction was taken up with celebrity autobiographies, all written by ghostwriters. This year, it looks like the entire fiction list will be taken up with celebrity novels, again all written by ghostwriters.

Publishers will put anything between covers that they think will sell. I'm surprised that their lists contain any books that aren't by celebrities or the latest self-help or diet bullcon. Publishers are not interested in finding and nurturing the latest great writer and they aren't dispirited by publishing celebrity books, otherwise they wouldn't do it. It's that simple.

People buy "lowbrow" celebrity novels because they like easily-digested, plot-driven novels, the same kind which are written by most popular authors writing under their own names.

Most of the books that are sold are purchased by casual readers who are attracted by the latest hyped diet, self-help, scandal, demagogic political screed by some radio or TV blowhard or whatever Oprah recommends. Everything else is marginal. Literary novels and serious nonfiction books have low sales because the erudite, discriminating reader is a statistical freak, if not actually a ghost. Ezra Pound was once asked why there wasn't more great poetry. Because, Pound said, there aren't more great audiences.

Desperate Writers

Today, I read Jonathan Field's PuffPo post, "Why Book Trailers Don't Go Viral," in which he seems to honestly assess how ineffective book videos are as a promotional tool:

One, those who tell you "you need to make something that's gonna go viral" don't know what the hell they're talking about. There is no magic formula, no button you get to push and nobody you pay to get there. You have control over what you create, but the world has control over how far and how fast your creation travels. And, two, the more you make something with the express purpose of "going viral," the less likely it'll be to happen.

Unfortunately, he then goes on to tell you his secrets to creating book videos that can become viral sensations, with inane bromides like, "I'm going to let you in on the real secret to making yourself instantly viral.

Be insane...

* Insanely creative
* Insanely valuable
* Insanely funny
* Insanely offbeat
* Insanely provocative..."


What hath Steve Jobs wrought? Field's advice is like telling a fledgling painter seeking the secret to success, "Well, that's easy, be Picasso, be Edward Hopper, be Rembrandt, be Dali, be ..."

And then I read the comments to Field's post. Now, let me briefly digress. Yesterday, I read Robert McCrum's column in the Guardian, whose title and subtitle tell you all you need to know: "Stop the bean-counters ruling the fiction roost. How can good new writers be published when the industry is ruled by people who aren't interested in originality?"

Boh Field's and McCrum's pieces share two commonalities. 1. They offer no useful information for writers. Fields' is an insipid exercise in self-promotion. McCrum acts as if he just discovered publishers' bottom-line sensibility. 2. Both articles are bait for desperate writers to pile on with their comments, which helps build circulation for publishers of these articles.

What I found most interesting about the comments to these articles is how they always come from three types of writers.

1. Writers who've been traditionally published who use their comment to promote themselves.

2. Writers who love to recount their stories about how they almost had a book deal until they lost it through various circumstances, usually the fault of the excessively commercial publishers' marketing department's interference. These make up the preponderance of the comments to McCrum's article.

3. Clueless incompetents like the writer at PuffPo who writes, "I started a fiction novel over a year ago, and am about 350 pages into so far."

The burden on writers today is crushing. It's not enough to write an engrossing book. You're also expected to be a promotional genius. No wonder writers are so desperate.

Some Thoughts On Publishing

Timothy Egan

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

Lawrence Osborne

In other words, publishing has drifted into the paper-thin celebrity culture that defines just about every other domain, and which is rendering American culture as dull and monotonous as anything in Western history.

But just as newspapers are dooming themselves by cutting the very thing they alone can provide--in-depth, on the spot reporting--so publishing houses are dooming themselves by trying to run in somebody's else's rat race and cutting the very thing we turn to them for: writing itself.

Americans love bloviating about the "death" of this and the "emergence" of that. But a culture of multiplicity simply offers the inquiring mind different things for different moments. Books don't actually compete with the Internet or movies, and never did.

We the readers, the people, are not dumbed down media serfs obsessed with celebrities, dosh and movie rights. You are.

HarperCollins' New "No Advance" Imprint

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies.

The new unit is HarperCollins’s effort to address what its executives see as some of the more vexing issues of the book industry. “The idea is, ‘Let’s take all the things that we think are wrong with this business and try to change them,’ ” said Mr. Miller, 51.

If extravagant advances are one of the problems with publishing, then why did Miller pay an unheard of $6.7 million advance for the rights to a Tuesdays With Morrie clone called The Last Lecture when he was heading Hyperion?

But then again, what do CEOs really know anyway? As Mark Twain said, "An executive is a man who makes decisions and is sometimes right."

Same Old Article From Publishing Insider

Louise Tucker's article about publishing reads like just about every other article and book by agents and editors I've read before.

Back when I was submitting my first book proposal, in 1992, I deduced that agents and editors thought alike. After submitting about 30 queries and a handfull of proposals, I had no takers, and about six agents who rejected me gave roughly the same reason for their rejection.

Anyway, back to Tucker's article and the comments appended to it. If Louise Tucker expresses the same sentiments about publishing as every other insider I've read, it doesn't make them ogres out to destroy literature. What it does mean is that they share, with very few exceptions, an institutional mentality. Some of the commentators scoffed at her assertions about how editors seek great books as well as her rationale for publishing celebrity books, but that is what she believes.

No one is going to change publishing and get anywhere by critcising the fundamental beliefs of publishers. Its like trying to reason a theist out their religious beliefs.

A Best Books List That Imparts a Lesson

"As promised, Pajiba presents The Generation’s Best Books as defined by our readers."

I didn't copy the list, so go take a look at it. Also note this:

If you’re curious, the selections that just missed the top 15 cutoff were The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingslover); Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon); Wicked (Gregory Maguire); Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke); and The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)

Unlike most “greatest” and “best” lists, which are empty marketing ploys, Pajiba’s is very revealing, though not for the reason’s Pajiba or its readers think.

I haven’t read any of these books, yet, except for Geek Love and Wicked, I’ve read a great deal about them. They were all heavily promoted and reviewed when they were first published. They were all published by major league publishers. None were published by a small press, let alone self-published.

As prominent agent Simon Lipskar recently wrote:

It’s depressing to admit this, but if anything, I think it should be freeing for authors to realize that the burden of turning their books into bestsellers remains where it has always been: on the publishers.

That’s not to imply that authors shouldn’t do all the things that they can to promote themselves, but the ugly truth is without massive effort and expense, there’s not much they can do to break out of the pack that’s independent of their publishers’ efforts.

Misplaced Print-On-Demand Euphoria

POD Critic is a new blog whose author hopes to take the place of POD-DY Mouth now that she's stopped reviewing books and commenting on things POD.

POD Critic recently wrote posts here and here filled with the kind of nearly evangelical optimism about POD that makes me wince. Here are some key quotes:

Right now, print-on-demand is an advanced printing technology and business model.

It is not particularly advanced, unless you still get wowed by making copies at Kinkos. And it is not a business model (see below). Anyone who confuses a printing technology with a business model doesn't know what they are talking about.

What will determine the true economic advantage of POD technology will be the adoption of its use by large publishers for frontlist books.

I'll make a prediction here. Large publishers will never use POD tech for anything other than certain backlist titles where demand has fallen to a few copies a year. Frontlist titles are ones for which the publisher anticipates (and creates) great demand. Consequently, they print a lot of copies and wharehouse them to be ready to meet that demand. You think Scholastic is going to publish the latest Harry Potter using POD and then play frantic catch up with the POD machines running full speed 24/7? Of course not.

The future is POD, folks; and like I told Jeremy Robinson, you're a part of a burgeoning industry, as authors and publishers, and everyone will soon have to adapt to it.

This is just silly. When I buy a car, I don't become a part of the automotive industry. When I buy a box of cereal, I don't become part of General Mills.

Getting back to my point, however, the more people added to your collective voice, the stronger that voice will become, until those on the other side of this industry will have no choice but to come when that voice beckons them.

What the hell is POD Critic talking about?

Novelist Maya Reynolds has provided some very clear-headed analysis of POD Critic’s posts.

The real problem is that POD publishers have given the technology a bad name by printing whatever dreck comes in the door accompanied by a writer with a check who says she wants to self-publish.

Until the self-publishing industry develops a filter system to weed out the garbage, even quality self-published authors will bear a stigma.

I am less kind than Ms. Reynolds is to POD Critic's "grandiose" (in her words) fantasy that somehow, if enough writers self-publish using POD, their books will somehow escape the prejudice usually assigned to self-published books.

Even if a major trade publisher started publishing their frontlist tomorrow using POD, it won't legitimize self-published books. Before POD tech came on the scene (I first read about it in 1997) writers self-published their books using the same offset printing employed by the majors. That didn't help them escape the prejudice against self-published books.

The problem with self-published books, as Ms. Reynolds points out, is not the way they are printed, but the way they are selected (or not). POD doesn't change that.

What Value Do Agents and Editors Add?

At his blog, Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito recommends this article by Stephen Page, president of the Publishers Association. Esposito then writes:

POD technology is generally a good thing that will make it easier for more people to get into publishing, but writers still need editors and publishers. The capability of anyone to publish a book without some kind of gatekeeper to discern quality and work with a writer is a bad thing.

And don't think that direct access to POD technology will make those gatekeepers go away. As publishers have spent less and less resources on proper editing and publicity, those jobs have been outsourced to agents and freelance publicists. Similarly, if POD technology really turns anyone into a potential publisher, new gatekeepers will eventually spring up. The choice is if you want something ad hoc and quasi-professional, like today's agent-editors, or if you want dedicated professionals getting the job done right.

To which I ask, why is is that with so many “dedicated, professional” gatekeepers, so many bad books get published? I responded a couple of times to Scott in the comments there. After he, having never given one specific example to support his conclusion that there are many editors, at least at small presses, sacrificing themselves to discover and nurture the literary masterpieces of our time, said I didn't know what I was talking about, I wisely decided to give it up.

I really am not in the mood right now to write another 1,000 word or longer meditation on this subject so that the five people a day who stumble over this blog glance at it just long enough to realize that I don't offer the kind of celebrity gossip better served up by Perez Hilton before moving on. If you want a fresh angle on this, go to Grumpy Old Bookman (on the Recommended sidebar on the left) and download his free ebooks about publishing and writing.